The Other Side of the Barricades

In her book The Death of the Grownup, Diana West quotes this observation by a prominent writer:

When we are confronted only with violence for violence’s sake, and with attempts to frighten or intimidate an administration into doing things for which it can itself see neither the rationale nor the electoral mandate; when we are offered, as the only argument for change, the fact that a number of people are themselves very angry and excited; and when we are presented with a violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally, ought to exist in its place — then we of my generation can only recognize that such behavior bears a disconcerting resemblance to phenomena we have witnessed within our own time in the origins of totalitarianism in other countries…

This seems appropriate to our current political circumstances. All across the West, attempts to frighten or intimidate — or even just self-induced fears that such attempts might occur — evoke cowardly reactions in our political leaders. From the Fort Hood Massacre to the Geert Wilders trial, from the streets of Cologne to the ivied halls of Yale, from the Anti-Zionist Party of Mohammed Omar to the “ten thousand angry Muslims” promised by Lord Ahmed: the frightening and intimidation initiated by Muslims are having their intended effect on the kafir, who bends himself into ever more debased positions of submission as a result.

The above quote, however, was written more than forty years ago, and concerned the student uprisings of the late 1960s that drove fear into the hearts of college administrators and politicians across the USA.

The article, entitled “Rebels Without a Program”, was written in January 1968 by George F. Kennan, who went on to say:
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People should bear in mind that if this — namely, noise, violence and lawlessness — is the way they are going to put their case, then many of us who are no happier than [the student radicals] are about some of the policies that arouse their indignation will have no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades.

Unfortunately, the sad outcome of the student tantrums of 1968 was that the majority of adults in positions of authority did not place themselves on the other side of the barricades. They gave in to student demands — sometimes reluctantly and piecemeal, sometimes willingly and with unseemly haste — and thereby ushered in the postmodern politically correct dystopia that all of us suffer under today.

The student radicals mau-maued their elders into submission, and today’s political leaders seem poised to recapitulate the same process in a 21st-century context.

The last three or four generations of Western political and intellectual leaders have killed and gutted a once-magnificent civilization and left the stinking corpse for the jackals of Islam to feast on. Or, to switch metaphors, our leftist radicals have managed to construct a complex and lethal cultural weapon, and have now handed over the keys and the operator’s manual to the Great Jihad.

It may be too late to do anything about this slow-motion train wreck, but it’s important to see clearly what has happened to us. Even if we can’t get out of the way in time, we can at least look up and see the monster engine steaming full-speed down the tracks at us.